Nuovo gruppo: il Gruppo Screencast

Screencasts are videos which show users how to achieve a specific task in Ubuntu. They can be seriously useful when walking users through a new task and are intended to complement Ubuntu’s other support resources, such as documentation, forums, mailing lists and irc.

The project is led by Alan Pope, who has already done some great work on screencasts. But now the project is expanding, and you can help out! Simply head over to the team wiki page (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ScreencastTeam/) and soak up the material there. You’ll then be ready to contribute to the team by requesting or even making new videos!

New Mailing List: xubuntu-users

Cody A.W. Somerville, a member of the Xubuntu Team, has announced the creation of the xubuntu-users mailing list.

"As you may or may not know, we've recently been discussing setting up an xubuntu-users mailing list. As of today, this mailing list exists and is ready for consumption! This mailing list is for help and support with a bit of user discussion on the side."

Ubuntu Mozilla Team

The first meeting of the Ubuntu Mozilla Team (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam) was held on January 11th at 17 UTC. The Mozilla Team was created in order to help raise the quality of Mozilla application on Ubuntu. The meeting covered the structure of the team and set guidelines on how the team would accomplish their goal. The Mozilla team is just being organized now and if you are interested, please see the link and join #ubuntu-mozillateam on irc.freenode.net.

Ubuntu-Women IRC Meeting

First Ubuntu-Women meeting was held January 11-12th, 2007, on #ubuntu-women on irc.freenode.net. It was a quite exciting roundup and a meet-and-greet with other women using Ubuntu. You can read a summary on Ubuntu-Women Wiki (http://wiki.ubuntu-women.org/Meetings/20070111) and download the full log of the day.

Community Council Meeting

The Community Council met again on January 9th, and as usual covered a number of issues. Membership approvals have been making meetings run really long, so are being delegated out. That process is coming along smoothly, and more council members are expected to be set up soon. With regard to translations, Carlos is setting up a team that will be the Rosetta point of contact for the many translation teams. (Rosetta is a tool integrated with Launchpad for making translation easier.) It was decided that the doc wiki would be licensed under CC-BY-SA, but discussion about the main help wiki was deferred for the time being. Forums members Mike and Matthew were both approved for sitting on the Forums Council. The German Kubuntu group (kubuntu-de.net) is well on its way to becoming an official Loco Team. They plan to cooperate with ubuntuusers.de for a unified K/Ubuntu presence in Germany, and have just gotten their mailing list set up. The CanadianTeam and IranianTeam were approved and welcomed as official locoteams now as well.

LoCo News

Philippines Loco Interview

If you've ever wanted to learn more about any of the members of the Philippines Loco, you can read about Jerome Gotangco. Jerome has been involved with Ubuntu for several years and has helped with many projects such as Edubuntu documentation, translations, and more. To read the full interview, please go here.

This Week's Quiz

Unfortunately, this week's Trivia contest was canceled. However, the Trivia Team reports that next week will occur as usual.

Upcoming for next week:

Sponsor : Prize :

To participate in the quiz, join #ubuntu-trivia on irc.freenode.net on Friday and/or Saturday UTC-nights - the topic will usually tell you when the next quiz is scheduled.

To give a quiz, contact Alexandre Vassalotti (theCore) - we will probably find you a spot.

The quiz usually has a theme, and the quizmaster will sometimes tell you what the theme of the quiz will be. If not, you can always bribe him/her. By winning the quiz and foregoing the prize, you donate it for the next quiz. This is especially appreciated if you are a frequent winner.

In The Press

Ubuntu Lite Vs. Xubuntu

"And, as surprising as this may sound, I would suggest totally ignoring Ubuntu Lite, as I can’t see any advantage to it over Xubuntu whatsoever. Any speed advantages can be mirrored by simply installing the Ice windows manager after installing Xubuntu."

Ubuntu US LoCo Team Mentor Meeting

Monday, January 22, 2007

Fiesty Developer Sprint

Start: 2007-01-22 09:00 End: 2007-01-26 23:59

Location: Oslo, Norway

Community Spotlight - Process of the Week

Main Inclusion Report

In order for a package to be included in the set of fully supported Ubuntu packages (the main section of the repositories), it must go through an approval process to show that it is fit to be covered by security-related and QA support. This process consists basically of some pre-application discussion, filling out a form, and then having that form reviewed; it is pretty straightforward. Talk about it with a few people on the ubuntu-devel IRC channel and mailing ahead of time to get an idea of any issues that may need to be addressed first. When the package feels ready, it will need to have what's called a Main Inclusion Request (or MIR) filled out and filed.

Want to fill out an MIR for your favourite universe package? Read on:

To get started, you will need to create a blank request to start filling out. This is done on the Ubuntu wiki, and yours should be located at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/MainInclusionReportPackageName. Simply replace PackageName with of course the name of the package in your browser's location bar, and if the page exists, you can stop here and contact the page author to collaborate, and if not create the page from the MainInclusionReportTemplate (list on the left). Also check the list of existing ones on UbuntuMainInclusionQueue in case someone named it differently. The template will list the sections you need to fill out, and make sure you do all of the sections. Note that MIRs are written for source packages, not binary builds.

A MIR includes a number of pieces of information about a package to show it meets various requirements for consideration. There should be a link to the source package within the universe section of the Ubuntu repositories, showing that it already exists in universe (which is another process to get into). It must be available for all supported architectures (as applicable). Next is the rationale, and it is important that there be a strong rationale for including the package. This should include things like being useful for a broad portion of the user base, being a new dependency or build dependency of a package that is already supported, the source was in another package in main that has been split, or replaces a package currently being supported while having higher quality and/or better features. Generally it should not duplicate the functionality of another package in main. Make sure to make a solid case for inclusion in your rationale section.

Another major point that will be looked at very closely is the packages security record. Its recent history and current state must be such that it can be confidently supported for 18 months (the normal life cycle of Ubuntu releases) without exposing users to an inappropriate level of risk. This section should cite security tracking services to show the packages record, note that it does not open any ports, and it may be useful to mention any people who have already reviewed the source code, in addition to those that will after you submit the request.

Next should be some notes regarding quality assurance for the package. You may wish to describe the installation and setup process for it, or otherwise show that it can be made to work properly with a reasonable amount of configuration and reading of documentation after installation. Next note any debconf questions it asks and their priorities, none of which can be above "medium". Link to bug listings in Launchpad, Debian, and upstream to show that the package is without critical or showstopper bugs and is reasonably maintained. Also, note anything about hardware, as it shouldn't deal with exotic things that Ubuntu can't support.

Finally, on some technicalities, demonstrate that the package complies with the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, Debian Policy, Debian library packaging guide standards, standard debhelper/cdbs/dbs packaging, and standard patch system conventions. Also, all dependencies need to be in main as well (or requested along with your package).

Now! Once that's all taken care of, you're ready to submit the request. To do so, add a link to it on UbuntuMainInclusionQueue, and also send an e-mail to the ubuntu-devel mailing list with a link to the page you've just created. If you don't get any bites right away, start looking around for a core dev who can look it over for you. (You may want someone to check before you submit too, as a preliminary step.) Now just sit back and wait, and answer any questions and make any corrections as you get feedback from the reviewing developer. If all goes well, it will eventually be added to the seed for main.

Additional Ubuntu News

Conclusion

Credits

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

Isabelle Duchatelle

Martin Albisetti

Cody A.W. Somerville

Tony Yarusso

anyone else that contributes

And many others

Feedback

This document is maintained by the Ubuntu Marketing Team. Please feel free to contact us regarding any concerns or suggestions by either sending an email to ubuntu-marketing@lists.ubuntu.com or by using any of the other methods on the Ubuntu Marketing Team Contact Information Page (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MarketingTeam). If you'd like to contribute to a future issue of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, please feel free to edit the appropriate wiki page.